The present invention relates to a digital map display scrolling method, a digital map display scrolling device and a storage medium for storing a digital map display scrolling program which are for scrolling a displayed portion of a digital map as map information in digital form within a display screen.
Digital maps as map information in digital form are maps put into electronic form so as to be handled on the display screen of a computer such as a portable computer etc. This kind of digital map is referred to as an electronic map or map software, where maps can be displayed on a display screen.
With this kind of digital map, a map is displayed on, for example, the display screen of a portable computer so that such an operation that a target is set on the map can be carried out, with these digital maps being applied to car navigation systems etc. in recent years.
Incidentally, when a displayed portion of the digital map of the related art is scrolled with this displayed portion displayed at the display screen so as to bring around a displayed portion for the place the user wishes to see, the digital map displayed portion is scrolled a little by little in a so-called "hand scrolling" using hand-shaped icon (button), referred to as a "grabber hand".
In digital map scrolling in this kind of hand scrolling situation, it is necessary to shift the position of the grabber hand once within the display screen and then repeat similar operations to scroll through the displayed portion. Namely, in such a scrolling method of the displayed portion employing a grabber hand, only a discontinuous hand scrolling of the displayed portion is possible.
It is therefore impossible to continuously scroll the displayed portion of the digital map with the digital map in related art. In addition, the scrolling of the displayed portion by the discontinuous hand scrolling can only be carried out at a fixed speed.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a digital map display scrolling method, a digital map display scrolling device, and a storage medium for storing a digital map display scrolling program which enable continuous scrolling of a displayed portion of a digital map at an arbitrary speed by solving the above problems.